WINDOW ON HOTERE
They met in London in the 1960s. Artist Ralph Hotere had a New Zealand Art Societies Fellowship to study at London’s Central School of Art and Design; writer Vincent O’Sullivan was a student at Oxford University.
Back in New Zealand, their paths continued to cross. Hotere admired O’Sullivan’s biographies, particularly the highly acclaimed Long Journey to the Border about writer John Mulgan; O’Sullivan appreciated the meditative beauty, the sheer force, the enduring engagement with the varying depths of blackness, that continue to define Hotere’s work, “and I liked him as a bloke”.
In 2004, when Hotere asked him if he would consider writing his biography, O’Sullivan, however, was not too sure.
“I said, ‘I’m not Māori, I’m not an art critic.’ He said, ‘That is fine, because I don’t want anyone with an agenda.’”
It was a gentlemen’s agreement, based on trust and, it appears, mutual respect. A photograph taken in 2005 shows them in Hotere’s Port Chalmers’
